Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Man and Nature

In 1864, George Perkins Marsh
published Man and Nature, the book that was the granddaddy of the modern
ecology movement.Marsh was the U.S.
Minister to Italy, and while overseas, he visited the sites of many ancient
civilizations.This was a troubling and
mind-expanding experience for him.

Wandering through the realms of extinct civilizations, he
realized that they were all victims of self-destruction.Marsh saw ancient seaports that were now 30
miles (48 km) from the sea.He saw
ancient places where the old streets were buried beneath 30 feet (9 m) of
eroded soil.He stood in mainland
fields, 15 miles (24 km) from the sea, which used to be islands.

He saw the sites of ancient
forests, formerly covered with three to six feet (1-2 m) of soil, where nothing
but exposed rock remained.He learned
that the removal of protective trees and vegetation led to the loss of
topsoil.He learned that irrigation
often led to salinization— the soil became so salty that it was
rendered infertile.

There wasn’t much left of the formerly healthy ecosystems of
the Mediterranean basin or the Fertile Crescent — places that once supported
large thriving cities.With few
exceptions, the modern population in these ravaged lands was far less than the
population two thousand years ago.Most
of the big ancient cities were either abandoned ghost towns, or desolate
shadows of their former grandeur.

In the realm of the former Roman Empire, more than half of
the lands were deserted, desolate, or greatly reduced in productivity.Forests were gone, much topsoil had been
lost, springs had dried up, and rivers had shrunk into brooks.Fertile lowlands had become malarial swamps.

One unforgettable section in
the book described in rich detail the arrival of farmers and herders in the
French Alps.They had been driven into
the mountains by population pressure.They whacked down the trees and then turned their livestock loose.The grazing animals stripped the land of all
grass, and pulverized the scorched soil with their hooves.

Without forest or grass, the land could retain little
water.When the wet season came, the
water promptly ran off, taking the soil with it.Tiny creeks turned into roaring torrents, and
entire fields and villages were suddenly washed away.Some places were reduced to bare bedrock
wastelands.

For example: “The land slip, which overwhelmed, and covered
to the depth of seventy feet, the town of Plurs in the valley of the Maira, on
the night of the 4th of September, 1618, sparing not a soul of a population of
2,430 inhabitants, is one of the most memorable of these catastrophes, and the
fall of the Rossberg or Rufiberg, which destroyed the little town of Goldau in
Switzerland, and 450 of its people, on the 2nd of September, 1806, is almost
equally celebrated.”

Marsh summed it up: “It is, in general, true, that the
intervention of man has hitherto seemed to insure the final exhaustion, ruin,
and desolation of every province of nature which he has reduced to his
dominion.The instances are few, where a
second civilization has flourished upon the ruins of an ancient culture, and
lands once rendered uninhabitable by human acts or neglect have generally been
forever abandoned as hopelessly irreclaimable.”

Marsh was from Vermont, where ambitious Americans were
working furiously to replace forests with farms, and villages with industrial
cities.There were still vast numbers of
passenger pigeons, “which migrated in flocks so numerous that they were whole
days in passing a given point.”He
thought that farmers spurred their numbers by providing them with abundant
grain to nibble on, and by waging genocide on their natural predators, the
hawks.Farmers hated hawks because they
often snatched their chickens without paying for them.

He was also amazed by the
abundance of salt-water fish.“It does
not seem probable that man, with all his rapacity and all his enginery, will
succeed in totally extirpating any salt-water fish.”He could not foresee the arrival of
industrial fishing, because he could not imagine human foolishness growing to
such magnitude.

In Europe, he could observe the ruins of many civilizations,
and note that this was how most experiments in agriculture ended.In America, he observed the same process in
its infancy.Marsh was painfully aware
that all of the worst mistakes made in the Old World were being imported to
America, with similar effects.

The destruction of Old World civilizations had taken
centuries, but Americans had all the latest technology, and their ability to
ruin the land was far more efficient.Loggers were busy harvesting lumber in the mountains of New York.Hunters were busy driving the passenger
pigeons to extinction.Farmers were
destroying the vast healthy grasslands.It was not difficult to accurately predict the consequences of this
madness.

The Western world was out of its mind with Perpetual Growth
Fever, and everyone cheered for skyrocketing prosperity — nothing was more
wonderful!The fever continues to rage
today.Marsh lamented, “The fact that,
of all organic beings, man alone is to be regarded as essentially a destructive
power….”He realized that he was living
in a world gone mad.He could very
clearly see a horror show that the rest of society denied and disregarded.

Marsh was a brilliant outside-the-box thinker who was fully
present in reality.He cared more about
the vitality of the ecosystem than for temporary bursts of prosperity.He had a spiritual connection to life.He radiated intense common sense.He sincerely believed that it would be wise
to learn from our mistakes, rather than endlessly repeat them.He thought that it would be wrong to remain
on a path that would inevitably transform America into a wasteland.

In 2007, friends in California’s redwood country
were hammered by floods.Loggers, who
were working upstream, vigorously denied that the floods had anything
whatsoever to do with their recent clear-cuts.It was a pure coincidence.Amazingly, the loggers were not seized by angry mobs and lynched for
spewing such colossal lies.They got
away with their crime because the education system has utterly failed to
provide society with a competent understanding of ecology and sustainability.

Marsh did a decent job of providing readers with the ABC’s of
ecology.Many years have passed since
the first edition of Man and Nature was published.For the most part, his book has survived the
test of time, and remains valid and important.But almost no high school (or university) graduates (or their
instructors) would recognize Marsh’s name, or be able to intelligently discuss
the history of logging, agriculture, topsoil destruction, and the fatal flaws
of civilization — essential subjects that every citizen should understand in
elementary school.

Marsh, George
Perkins.Man and Nature.Charles
Scribner, New York, 1864.The full
contents of this book are available online at:

Marsh didn’t have a
camera, but in 1938-39 Dr. W. C. Lowdermilk visited similar regions and came to
similar conclusions — and he had a camera.He created a booklet titled Conquest
of the Land Through Seven Thousand Years.It’s available at: